Heritage "It is hard to overstate the dangerous implications of what happened this week when President Obama was caught by an open mic sending a message to Russia’s dictator-in-waiting to wait quietly till after the November elections, after which Mr. Obama could make concessions on America’s national defense. The White House is trying to explain this incident away as par for the course in an electoral year. It is not.
"Here, in essence, is what it appears to be: this was our commander in chief in league with an anti-American autocrat to dupe the American public until after it’s too late. What makes it even worse is that the issue at hand–missile defense–has to do with protecting the American people against the likes of Russia.
....The President’s surreptitious hat-tip to Putin comes at a dangerous time for the American people and U.S. allies. North Korea is preparing to launch yet another long-range missile, and Iran is in desperate pursuit of a nuclear weapon. Meanwhile, the United States and its allies remain unprotected from the threat of nuclear missiles, and now it appears that Obama wants to cede even more ground to Russia on vital national security issues
William Kristol:Obama Compounds the Problem"But it's deeply inappropriate for the president to discuss election year considerations—especially with a foreign leader whose country is often hostile to U.S. interests. Obama's comments are therefore not only an acknowledgment of his thorough politicization of American foreign policy. They also represent a self-inflicted diminution of the stature of the American president in the world."
Daily Caller"“His family should be outraged at the fact that they’re using this child as the bait to inflame racial passions,” Rev. C.L. Bryant said in a Monday interview with The Daily Caller. "The conservative black pastor who was once the chapter president of the Garland, Texas NAACP called Jackson and Sharpton “race hustlers” and said they are “acting as though they are buzzards circling the carcass of this young boy.”"
Police: Zimmerman says Trayvon decked him with one blow then began hammering his head"With a single punch,Trayvon Martindecked the Neighborhood Watch volunteer who eventually shot and killed the unarmed 17-year-old, then Trayvon climbed on top of George Zimmerman and slammed his head into the sidewalk, leaving him bloody and battered, law-enforcement authorities told the Orlando Sentinel. "That is the account Zimmerman gave police, and much of it has been corroborated by witnesses, authorities say."
.... "This is what the Sentinel has learned about Zimmerman's account to investigators:"....
Zimmerman told them he lost sight of Trayvon and was walking back to his SUV when Trayvon approached him from the left rear, and they exchanged words.
Trayvon asked Zimmerman if he had a problem. Zimmerman said no and reached for his cell phone, he told police. Trayvon then said, "Well, you do now" or something similar and punched Zimmerman in the nose, according to the account he gave police.
Zimmerman fell to the ground and Trayvon got on top of him and began slamming his head into the sidewalk, he told police. Zimmerman began yelling for help.
Several witnesses heard those cries, and there has been a dispute about whether they came from Zimmerman or Trayvon. Lawyers for Trayvon's family say it was Trayvon, but police say their evidence indicates it was Zimmerman.
One witness, who has since talked to local television news reporters, told police he saw Zimmerman on the ground with Trayvon on top, pounding him — and was unequivocal that it was Zimmerman who was crying for help. Zimmerman then shot Trayvon once in the chest at very close range, according to authorities. When police arrived less than two minutes later, Zimmerman was bleeding from the nose, had a swollen lip and had bloody lacerations to the back of his head.
Why Manipulate the Tragedy of Trayvon Martin?"Family breakdown, not white racism, is the biggest impediment facing blacks today, producing such casualties as the 18-year-old gangbanger who fatally shot a 34-year-old mother picking up her child from school in Brownsville, Brooklyn, last October. Sharpton and the national media didn’t show up for that killing, just as they don’t for the thousands of other black-on-black killings each year. By all means, demand justice for Trayvon Martin. But when that justice comes, as it most surely will, perhaps some small part of the energy devoted to securing it could be redirected towards stigmatizing black criminals and revalorizing the role of fathers in families."
Victor Davis Hanson: Racial-Relations Regression"Fairly or not, by now the president, through his past selective editorializing, has lost a great deal of credibility as a national healer.
Maxine Waters would not condemn
the LA riots and the maiming of Reginald
Denny, calling it all a "rebellion"
"While it is natural that African-American activists need answers as to why the armed assailant Mr. Zimmerman was not charged in the shooting, they also cannot explain why their attention is not in commensurate fashion focused on the far greater number of young black males gunned down, many just last week in Chicago, by other black males. Nor can they explain to the non-African-American community why the far greater instances of black-on-white violent crime supports any such notion of a supposed war on young black males."
....
"So far all that is clear is that there is a growing anger among African-Americans about a failure to immediately arrest the shooter that in turn is provoking an even greater backlash against the antics of Al Sharpton, the creepy bounty offered by the New Black Panther Party, and others who inflame for their own careerist advantage, and no one — not the president, not the media, not the civil rights leadership, not the politicians — seems willing or able to call for a time-out until all the facts are reviewed and released. We have collectively regressed to the days of Rodney King and the L.A. riots and the O. J. Simpson trial — or to something far worse. Hope and change came and went."
Are we to re-live this?Picture this: hordes of people descending on stores, looting them, being filmed carrying off millions of dollars of merchandise; businesses being burned and emergency personnel being shot at. Black areas of town left devastated and blackened with stores left shuttered and empty for years and unemployment in those areas skyrocketing. Then will come blame from the Jackson's, Sharpton's, Waters,Farrakhan'sand their like saying businesses will not come into those same areas because of "racism". What sane business would ever risk a fortune opening up in these violence-prone areas when one single incident could cause all they had there to be destroyed, with area politicians calling it a justified rebellion? The Tunnel Dweller.
Boston Herald:"Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.com dismissed the left’s online mean-spiritedness as a sign of weakness: “Barack Obama’s presidency is a failure and all they have left between now and the election is to get the base angry. So they’re spreading a lot of hatred. Hate is all they have left.”
Good news: Letterman’s jokes about Cheney’s heart problems still crowd pleasers "They must have some master checklist, last updated in 2006, titled “Funny Things About Dick Cheney” which they call up any time they write bits like this. At the very top of the checklist, apparently: Gravely serious cardiac complications. "I like Mika and she’s usually not a jerk, so I’m going to pretend that she’s convulsing here not over Cheney gasping for air but at either (a) the audacious tastelessness of the gags or (b) the sheer stale hackishness of the bit. Pretend with me."
More at The Blaze"At the tail end of his 90 minute meeting with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev Monday, President Obama said that he would have “more flexibility” to deal with controversial issues such as missile defense, but incoming Russian President Vladimir Putin needs to give him “space.”
The exchange was picked up by microphones as reporters were let into the room for remarks by the two leaders.
Affirmative Action and Radical Politics; Affirmative action radicalizes minority students whose achievements become suspect. "Universities operate under quotas masquerading as goals and government audits of racial outcomes known as cultural audits. Consequently, university administrators have numbers to produce because the government wants to see numbers. The reality is that the faculty that push black students through aren’t compassionate at all. They’re part of a bureaucracy that needs a certain statistical outcome. The black student is a means to an end. That end is a check in a box."
The article refers to this Thomas Sowell column entitled Race and Rhetoric in which Sowell writes:
Not only was unemployment among blacks in general lower before the liberal welfare state policies expanded in the 1960s, rates of imprisonment of blacks were also lower then, and most black children were raised in two-parent families. At one time, a higher percentage of blacks than whites were married and working.
Zimmerman not a racist, says family "Despite the racially charged nature of the case, Zimmerman's lawyer insisted his client was not racist. "I asked him, 'Are you a racist? Do you have anything against black people?' and he said 'No,'" Zimmerman's legal adviser Craig Sonner told CNN on Friday. "I don't see anything that indicates to me that he's a racist." Sonner said Zimmerman and his wife acted as mentors to two teenage African Americans, even after funding was cut for the program. They have also helped at a fundraiser for an African-American church, according to the lawyer.
Jesse Jackson bringing the hate"This is one reason why it is impossible to talk intelligently about race in this country. There are too many people invested in ratcheting up emotion and hate when it comes to the way in which incidents like the Trayvon Martin tragedy are portrayed. "Jesse Jackson - who probably felt left out of media coverage - has put both feet into the controversy."
PJ Media "The role of a president is to rein in the mob, not to unleash it. The latter is what community organizers do; the former is what makes statesmen. Yet on issue after issue — anti-terrorism, global warming, government ethics, and racial relations — a frenzied mob, egged on by the media and demagogues like Barack Obama, have almost stormed the jail, only to dissipate when met by either evidence, or the knowledge that the incarcerated was one of their own — as if they had never screamed and threatened in the first place."
PJ Media "Monday, March 26, 10:00 a.m.— The Court will hear 90 minutes of argument on whether a federal tax law bars any challenge to the mandate requiring all individuals to purchase or obtain health insurance. At issue will be the 145-year-old Anti-Injunction Act (AIA), which says:
No suit for the purpose of restraining the assessment or collection of any tax shall be maintained in any court by any person, whether or not such person is the person against whom such tax was assessed.
"It will be a momentous week for the interests of liberty, freedom, and the preservation of a constitutional republic."
George Will column: Obamacare's contract problem" Under Obamacare, Congress asserted the improper power to compel commercial contracts. It did so on the spurious ground that this power is necessary to solve a problem Congress created when, by forbidding insurance companies to deny coverage to individuals because of pre-existing conditions, it produced the problem of "adverse selection" — people not buying insurance until they need medical care."
IJcorrectly says that if the court were to ratify Congress' disregard for settled contract law, Congress' "power to compel contractual relations would have no logical stopping point." Which is why this case is the last exit ramp on the road to unlimited government. H/T to Rush Limbaugh for bringing this article to our attention.
Then perhaps, the government can force you to contract with a builder to upgrade your house, or to add insulation to the attic. Can they then force you to buy certain cars?
Obamacare Comes before the Supreme Court"America waits for the Supreme Court to weigh the facts and the law, to consider the precedents and the policy, and to issue a decision that will have implications far into the future. Will Congress be limited by the Constitution, or will its authority expand beyond the limits that the Founders intended? Will Americans’ liberties stand? Will Obamacare fall? No matter the outcome of the Court’s ruling in June, Congress can and should act now to repeal Obamacare and rid the land of this intolerable act."
From Legal Insurrection: Obamacare Oral Argument – Day 1"Via ScotusBlog, it does not appear that the Justices will buy into the administrations arguments, and will rule on the merits (caveat — oral argument questions and comments are not always a reliable indicator):"
From Oct 27, 2011:Tim Tebow -- a Fool? "To be sure, Tim is not the first professional athlete to publicly and robustly express his or her Christian faith. There is a long and storied history of stars who turned a portion of their platform into a pulpit of sorts, from the baseball-player-turned-evangelist Billy Sunday in 1887 to basketball great David Robinson, and, more recently, two of this week's World Series participants, the Cardinals' slugger Albert Pujols and the Rangers' Josh Hamilton.
"I, along with millions of others, admire these athletes not merely because of how they perform -- but because of how they conduct themselves while doing so."
The above Rich Terrell cartoon seems to depict New York fans, but mainly -I think- the New York press and mediaincluding Vanity Fair, which calls Tebow "ostentatiously pious". Paul the Apostle, in chapter 15 of his letter to the church in Rome warned that those who followed Christ would be considered foolish:
...AndifChristhasnotbeen raised, thenourpreachingis futileandyourfaithis empty.15:15Also, we are foundto be false witnessesabout God,becausewe have testifiedagainstGodthathe raisedChristfrom the dead, when in reality he didnotraisehim, if indeedthe deadarenotraised.15:16Forifthe deadarenotraised, then not evenChristhas been raised.15:17AndifChristhasnotbeen raised, yourfaithisuseless;you arestillinyoursins.15:18Furthermore, those who have fallen asleep10inChristhavealsoperished.15:19For ifonlyinthislifewe have hopeinChrist, we should bepitiedmore than anyone.Bible.org
Kerby Anderson at Point of View had this to say last Christmas:
And Tim Tebow has been a full recipient of the negative reaction against all things Christian. Who can forget how he was blasted in the run-up to Focus on the Family’s 2010 Superbowl ad?Pro-lifers are more than familiar with the story of Tim’s mom, Pam, a missionary, with her husband in the Phillippines… counseled to abort her baby to save her life following a placental abruption. She refused. That commercial was another platform in which Pam, appearing with Tim, told that story, sending a strong pro-life message without ever using the word “pro-life” or “abortion.”
When Pam Tebow was counseled to abort her baby to save her own life, the doctor referred to him as a “mass of fetal tissue.” (Emphasis added)
“(M)aybe she just called me that to toughen us up for the names I would be called the first time I played at LSU,” ... It’s true. He’s kept smiling while showing remarkable magnanimity toward critics. One, former Broncos QB Jake Plummer, suggested toning down the religious rhetoric.
Tebow responded that if it’s a good idea for a husband to tell his wife he loves her as often as he can, then wouldn’t it be appropriate to do the same when it comes to the most important relationship in his own life? “If people want to bash me for that, that’s OK. It really won’t bother me. At least they know what I believe.”
It's either cut and paste this font as is or manually retype the entire text. As a two-fingered typist, this is the way it has to be. TD The Astute Bloggers
Allen West
HERE ARE SOME OTHER GREAT GOP' ERS WHO HAPPEN TO BE/(WERE) BLACK: FREDERICK DOUGLASS; DR. MARTIN LUTER(sp) KING JR., JACKIE ROBINSON; EDWARD BROOKE; RON CHRISTIE; LARRY ELDER; JAMES FARMER; SAMUEL FULLER; JAMES MEREDITH; ROD PAIGE; SAM PIERCE; JOSEPH RAINEY; MICHAEL STEELE; LYNN SWANN; SOJOURNER TRUTH; HARRIET TUBMAN; BOOKER T. WASHINGTON; IDA WELLS; (PARTIAL LIST!). OH YEAH: EVEN ELDRIDGE CLEAVER WISED UP! IT'S LONG PASSED(sic) TIME THE LEFT WISED UP AND STOPPED RACE-BAITING.
Here are some African-American Columnists and conservative blogs TW links to: Armstrong Williams
"The first thing you notice about the video is that the atmosphere is dark, wintry, minor key. You see but don't hear the election night crowd in Grant Park, then the video switches to graphics about the economic meltdown following the financial crisis of 2008.
"There are see gloomy scenes throughout. Obama economic advisers arrive in a bleak Chicago after a snowstorm. The president is shown in the Oval Office through a window at night."
.... "The Washington Post's fact checker has already given the video three of a possible four Pinocchios for the Obamas' description of his mother's insurance situation in her final illness." .... "The Washington Post's fact checker has already given the video three of a possible four Pinocchios for the Obamas' description of his mother's insurance situation in her final illness."
From RealClearPolitics:Obama’s gasoline excuse machine"Inhibiting domestic oil production and increasing energy dependency on unfriendly regimes consigns the nation to persistent economic hardship. It doesn’t take a wizard to divine what polls are saying: If you want a second term, put down the magic wand, drilling bans and green fantasies. Let the free market provide affordable gas."On the other hand...
President Barack Obama blamed Fox News for his political woes in a private meeting with labor leaders in 2010, saying he was “losing white males” who tune into the cable outlet and “hear Obama is a Muslim 24/7,” according to journalist David Corn’s new book, “Showdown.
PJ Media""I was watching the show House Hunters last night on HGTV and noticed that, even with such a neutral show, in the space of ten minutes I saw two commercials that were abusive to men. In one commercial, a woman was angry at a man at work and dumped a cup of coffee on him. In another, a man was in the grocery store aisle anxiously trying to decide whether his wife (or girlfriend) wanted the sweetener Stevia or real sugar. He was terrified that if he bought her sugar, she would be angry as she was off sugar that week, but he was also afraid that she would get mad if he bought her artificial sugar as she would think he thought she was fat." " From a comment to this post by AVCurmudgeon :
And the one (some asthma medication) with the female trekking guide leading a guy across a swaying rope bridge. She moves confidently, he is unsteady and she says “watch your step!” He says “Thanks!” As though he couldn’t have thought of that one for himself.Actually my overall pet peeve is the never-ending flood of quasi-anorexic babes being presented as “tough guys”. Cote de Pablo (Ziva), Kathryn Erbe (Eames) and Marissa Hargitay (Olivia) pull it off. The others? I can only laugh.
Alan Caruba: Obamacare Versus the U.S. Constitution"The likelihood is that a federally administered health care system will destroy what is widely regarded as the best private sector health system in the world. It will put the government squarely between the physician and his patient, determining who receives treatment and the amount and cost of that treatment.
"The issue of contention for many Constitutional scholars and others is Obamacare’s demand that everyone either purchase a health insurance program or pay a fine for not doing so. Congress asserts this under the Commerce Clause, Article I, Section 8, Clause 3, that says it shall have the power “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with Indian Tribes.”
Can Obamacare Be Undone? "The short answer is, yes, Obamacare can be undone, if Republicans maintain their House majority in November, elect a Republican president, and get 50 Republican seats in the Senate. Obamacare can be repealed using thereconciliation process, because a simple one- or two-page repeal bill would have to be considered “germane” to the budget.
Many conservatives believe that the Supreme Court will do the heavy lifting for them, by striking down the law. But this is highly improbable."
